Harry Gruyaert

The `edges' that Harry Gruyaert, a pre-eminent member of the Magnum photo agency, explores in this incredibly lush, full-colour book, are the oceans, seas and rivers where humans meet the edge and the water begins. This unusual volume, which opens from the top up, takes the reader to Israel's Dead Sea, the Mali River in Niger, the North Sea of Iceland, South Korea and Biarritz, as Gruyaert's sensitive photos record the subtle chromatic vibrations of the edges of the Orient and the Occident. Gruyaert opposes the hustle of the city with a pared-down, yet intense, nature. His landscapes are never empty; they are inhabited places where light, colour, objects, people and situations weave a serene, sublime tableau. This beautifully produced photographic manifesto reveals the profoundly poetic character of Gruyaert's work, and the sensual elegance of his faultless compositions.

Alongside American photographers such as Saul Leiter, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, Harry Gruyaert became one of the few European pioneers to explore the creative possibilities of colour in the 1970s and 1980s. The previous decades had elevated black and white photography to the realms of art, relegating colour to use in advertising, the press and illustration. Gruyaert's work suggested new territory for colour photography: an emotive, non-narrative and boldly graphic way of perceiving the world. Gruyaert's ability to seamlessly weave texture, light, colour and architecture comes together to wonderful effect in this new collection. His photographs of airports beautifully - and at times surreally - record these liminal, yet reliably inhabited spaces.

For more than thirty years, Harry Gruyaert has been recording the subtle chromatic vibrations of Eastern and Western light. His photographs attest to his singular vision: his interest in story, public space and unexpected scenes. This book brings together 125 of Gruyaert's photographs of India, many published here for the first time. From Gujarat to Kerala, Gruyaert captured the quintessence of this multifaceted country. Streets bustling with activity in New Delhi or Calcutta; modest villages in Tamil Nadu or Rajasthan; ghats of the great religious city of Benares; women in saffron and purple saris beating grain, dyers busy at smoky vats, an encampment of nomadic shepherds at twilight... Gruyaert's India is saturated with colour, light and noise - and sometimes silence too. These images move beyond stereotype to present the plurality of India. 'Taking a photo means both seeking contact and refusing it, being at once the most and the least present,' says the photographer. It is a question of teasing out wonder, of capturing what characterizes places. The search for density within the frame makes photography a physical experience - one that is particularly well represented here, in this multi-sensorial journey through India.

New in the Photofile series, a mini-monograph on Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert. Born in Antwerp in 1941, Harry Gruyaert was a pioneer of European colour photography in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972, he created TV Shots, a series of images created by turning the dial on a television set at random and photographing the screen. Later he travelled the world, seeking out different kinds of light and exhibiting a particular fascination with borders, interfaces and incongruous juxtapositions. A member of Magnum Photos since 1982, he describes colour as 'a means of sculpting what I see ... it's the emotion of photography.' Most recently he has begun to explore the experimental freedom offered by digital photography. Autonomous, non-narrative and often witty, Gruyaert's images are complex encounters with colour and light.